Next Year
by corellian-smuggler
Summary: A night spent in an abandoned Jedi Temple doesn't go as planned. Sequel to Night of Unrest.


"I don't like this."

"Then go back."

"I got a bad feeling 'bout this whole thing."

"Then don't come," Luke replied from beside her, his voice a low, easy whisper in the darkness.

"Don't come," Han grumbled under his breath. "Don't come—of course I'm gonna come. Why the hell do I always end up coming along on these—whackjob—death missions..."

Leia rolled her eyes.

"...'s beyond me..."

"Han."

"What?"

"Be quiet," she hissed. Just the crunch of their boots over the fallen leaves was unbelievably loud in the gloom; and though she was loathe to admit it, Leia, too, was beginning to feel uneasy. The woods were silent and shrouded in a dense mist; the light of the planet's three moons was intermittently obscured by the thick fog and cloud cover, and the barren, skeletal branches of the trees in the darkness were menacing, unnerving silhouettes. Every hair on Leia's body seemed to be on end.

Luke was the reason they were there. Leia had found him outside her quarters three days before, pacing in his flight suit.

 _"Did you mean it," he'd asked earnestly, as she'd stood in the threshold of her room. "About helping me?"_

 _His eyes, hopeful and determined and yet empty of expectation, had been electric in the dim corridor. A chill had shivered down her spine then, like somehow she'd been feeling his nervous excitement in her own body._

A week later found them creeping through the woods at midnight with an exasperated Chewbacca and a downright furious Han Solo. Leia tamped down a pang of guilt as they stepped between tall, ancient trees. She and Luke had decided that Han wouldn't have readily agreed to take them to an abandoned Jedi temple on Mantor so that Luke could break in and search for lost knowledge about the Jedi Order, so instead Leia had given him a false assignment to make a run for bacta and antibiotics, and she and Luke had "tagged along". _It wasn't a lie_ , Leia assured herself sternly. _We did get the medical supplies. It just so happens that that wasn't our final destination, that's all._

Still, she couldn't help the twinge of regret that throbbed in her stomach. The look on his face when they'd revealed their deception earlier on the Falcon had been bitter, angry disbelief—not because they had forced him to come snooping around a Jedi temple on a planet with a significant Imperial presence—but because, Leia knew, she had deliberately manipulated him. She winced inwardly in the dark forest, remembering how she'd approached him the morning before his scheduled "supply run," asking if he might be willing to do her a favor. His expression, at once wary and fervently intrigued, had flickered for just a moment, but he hadn't been able to disguise that reaction fast enough to keep her from seeing.

 _"You'll have to be a little more specific than that, Princess," he'd shrugged, back to the forced-casual, false nonchalance that had characterized the majority of their interactions of late—the exchanges that didn't consist of heated, maddening bickering, that was. Leia had been driven near to tears by their latest argument, and worst of all she'd known that it had been mostly her own fault—incited by her increasingly frantic need to push him away and her growing desire to let him in. Being around Han had grown increasingly difficult for her, so difficult in fact that she found she couldn't be away from Han without thinking about him constantly, and yet couldn't be near to him without getting caught up in a whirlwind of confusing and unacceptable feelings. Maintaining their relationship—or friendship, as it were—had become practically impossible. Leia had been starting to wonder if they'd reached an impasse at last._

 _She must have looked a little too introspective, distracted from her rehearsed pitch by that telling look in his eyes, because he'd shed his smirk and taken a step closer to her._

 _"Everything alright?"_

 _"Yes," she'd assured him, brought back to the matter at hand. "I was just wondering if you might like some company to Mantor."_

 _"Company?" he'd echoed, eyebrows shooting up. The cocky mask had returned full force. "_ Royal _company, you mean? Don't tell me you're looking to take some time off, Princess. Rebellion getting you down?"_

 _In response, Leia had offered him only a tight-lipped smile, inexplicably anxious about what she'd been preparing to say._

 _"It's not time off if I'm accompanying you on an Alliance-contracted supply run," she'd murmured. Around them in the hangar flight crews had been running around and technicians were shouting, but she'd had the disconcerting sensation that she and Han were the only ones on the base. Heat had risen to her face as he'd looked down at her, calculating and curious, evidently waiting for her to explain what was, she had to admit, a suspicious turn of events. In light of the strife that had been festering between them, she couldn't blame him for being taken aback by her request to leave the planet with him for seemingly no reason._

 _Leia made a conscious effort not to let her sudden nervousness show._

 _"I just thought I might be able to request an invitation, since you'll be off-world," she'd murmured, "and we had… plans."_

 _She'd watched his gaze flicker momentarily towards the Falcon's ramp before coming to rest once more on her face. Han's stare had been piercing, and Leia had been simultaneously gratified and troubled to see the intensity that had burned in his eyes then._

 _He'd shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and she'd had to resist the urge to fidget, herself._

 _"I, uh, didn't think you remembered that," he'd mumbled at last. Her words—or rather, the implications of them—had seemed to transform him. No longer had he appeared the distant, jaded man from moments before. Instead his expression had become boyish and uncertain, and the look in his eyes had been so tender—his thoughts so obviously returned to their whispered exchange from the year before, on that shared confidence, and her casual intimation of that evening… Leia had abruptly looked away, suddenly feeling transparent and self-conscious, and instantly regretting having used their wistful agreement as a means to an end._

 _"I remember," she'd whispered, the words seeming to slip from her lips of their own accord._

 _Han had looked almost pained, she'd thought—as though he'd been certain she couldn't have possibly been standing before him, asking to be whisked away from base on his ship._

 _"We're leaving at 0700," he'd said finally, and then he'd turned and walked away._

Creeping over the bracken, the chill night air numbing her fingers and howling through the trees, Leia couldn't help but think of their so-called plans—couldn't help but remember the trembling heat that had shivered over her limbs and sizzled in her chest—burned in her belly—as she and Han had stood together outside the Falcon's crew quarters the year before. She couldn't help but think of his voice, low and yearning, _"Maybe next year,"_ and her breathless response, _"If you remember to leave the ramp down."_

It was the Night of Unrest, and Leia was plagued by the events of the previous year. She barely saw her surroundings as she, Luke, Han, and Chewie tread over the dead logs and fallen foliage that lay thick on the ground in the Mantorian woods. She hadn't been able to focus on the mission throughout the day—not the conveniently orchestrated supply run, nor their current trek towards the temple. Grimly she wondered if Han was as distracted as she was, if he was remembering how a year ago she'd come onboard his ship in the middle of the night, how they'd sipped hot chocolate together in their pajamas, or how she'd implied—that breathy, exhilarated challenge—that she'd sleep in his bunk with him this year.

 _Tonight. The Night of Unrest._

It haunted her.

Somewhere in the dark forest, a lonely wolf sang a solitary, mournful call.

Luke led the way as the four of them continued towards their destination. He was a dark silhouette in the mist, seeming somehow to know where to go even though it was Leia who carried the navicalculator.

"Not much farther," she whispered, checking their coordinates. Leia chanced a glance at Han, now walking directly beside her in the night. In the brief burst of moonlight, his tanned skin shone silver. His eyes seemed to be trained straight ahead, his blaster held tight in his hand, and his jacket was open despite the biting air and blustering wind. He made for an almost ghostly sight.

Leia pursed her lips.

 _"Jedi temple, huh? That's what this whole trip was for wasn't it? That's why Luke asked to come?"_

 _"Yes," Luke had shrugged at the same time that Leia had said, "No."_

 _In the Falcon's main hold, Han had turned accusatory eyes on her._

 _"So much for our 'plans,' huh Sweetheart?" he'd bit out. "Does the medcenter even need these supplies?"_

 _"Of course," she'd snapped, defensive, as always, in the face of his anger. "We just thought—given the location—"_

 _"You thought you'd assign me here so you could conveniently hitch a ride on my ship. That all I am? A taxi shuttle?"_

 _"You hate the Force, Han," Luke had cut in, eager as always to keep the peace. "We didn't think you'd agree to take us if we asked. And the rebellion does need the supplies—"_

 _"You didn't think I'd've helped you out?" Han had demanded. His tone had been one of deep offense, his expression sharply incredulous._

 _Luke had blinked at him._

 _"Would you have?" he'd asked calmly, and then Han had appeared nervous, himself—a nerf-in-headlights, Leia had thought—his jaw gone tense and his expression suddenly guarded. Or a caged animal, more like. It wasn't the first time Leia had seen that expression on his face._

 _"Yeah," he'd answered at length, decidedly defiant. It was as though he'd been daring the two of them to comment on the fact that he'd tacitly admitted what they'd always known and he'd long denied: Han cared about much more than money and himself. Han cared about them. "I would've."_

 _He'd turned to look Leia dead in the eye._

 _"Don't know what's worse, though. Being lied to, or being used."_

In the woods, Leia felt another wave of angry shame wash over her. Han had silently donned his jacket, grabbed his pack, and unholstered his blaster—obviously planning to accompany them despite his irritation—and then he'd marched down the ramp without sparing Leia another glance. She had deliberately looked down at her booted feet at that point, feeling Luke's and Chewie's eyes on her, and hating that she'd felt suddenly nauseous.

Leia had, with a sick feeling in her stomach, sensed everything that Han hadn't said: that there were precious few people that he trusted, and so Leia's lie was a stinging, deep betrayal. That for all his adamant assurances that he was a mercenary and nothing more, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, and he was cut that she and Luke had thought they needed to deceive him—bruised to think they might have only wanted him along because they needed his ship. And, most of all, Leia knew that he had perceived her initial request—her referral to their conversation from the year before—to be an inexcusable transgression on her part. She grimaced and tried to shake the thoughts from her head, beginning to worry that she had known that from the beginning, and wondering if maybe she might have hurt his feelings on purpose, anticipating how he would react when he learned the truth—anything to combat the terrible, mutual wanting that was so obviously between them.

"Did it never occur to you two that the Empire might be expecting Luke to show up some place like this? For all we know we're walking into a trap," Han said lowly as they crested a hill and saw, finally, a break in the trees ahead of them.

Leia looked down at her scanner once more. There were no large life forms on the radar other than the four of them—not in the forest, and not in the temple they were finally approaching.

"Scanner's clear," she murmured

Luke looked over his shoulder at them.

"It's not a trap," he said quietly. "I can… I can tell that it's not."

Beside her, Leia could practically feel Han's hackles rise in response to Luke's words—perturbed, exasperated, and wary. Admittedly, she couldn't help the shiver that trembled down her own spine, either.

 _"This Jedi temple," she'd whispered to Luke that day in the corridor. "How do you know about it?"_

 _They'd done extensive research into the subject, but the HoloNet had been wiped; the Empire, it seemed, had taken care to erase all public record of the Jedi beyond the history that they'd rewritten to suit their needs, and so they'd been hard-pressed to find anything that might have helped Luke learn about the Jedi Order._

 _Luke hadn't even hesitated._

 _"I dreamt it," he'd murmured, and Leia had stared at him._

 _"Then how do you know—?"_

 _"I know Leia," he'd smiled gently, in apparent understanding, like he'd known it would sound crazy and couldn't have faulted her for her question. But then his eyes had seemed to look past her, into something or someplace she couldn't see, and his voice had grown distracted and far-off. "I know that it's real. I can feel it."_

The sensation Leia had felt that day was exactly the same as the one she felt upon reaching the edge of the forest and finding herself before an immense, crumbling temple—exactly where Luke had said it would be. It was like seeing a curtain stir when there was no wind, or finding a door unlocked after having sworn to have previously locked it: eerie and unsettling.

"Guess this is the place," Han grunted as they stopped to crouch in the underbrush, peering up at the temple from a distance through the sparse branches and bushes.

Chewie warbled quietly.

"Yeah, you can say that again," Han muttered. "Looks like a kriffing miracle the thing's still standing."

He had a point there, Leia conceded grimly. The Jedi Temple at Mantor would most likely have appeared a bit run-down just by virtue of its age. She could tell, just by looking at it, that the structure must have been built thousands of years before. That wasn't why Han and Chewie were so obviously dubious, however. It was apparent, looking up at the temple—even in the darkness, illuminated only by the fleeting moonlight—that the building had been bombed. One part of the roof was missing completely. The great doors were falling off their hinges, and along the building's façade, enormous pillars were crumbling. None of them said anything else, as it was obvious to all of them what must have happened when the Empire had risen and the Jedi Order had fallen.

A massacre.

"Well," Leia whispered, "if it hasn't collapsed by now…"

A strong gust of wind blew. Deep in the forest, billowing between the trees, the wind was like a moan of anguish, and disturbing the fallen leaves all around them, it was frantic, hissing whispers in the darkness. Leia's words trailed off. She was incredibly uneasy now.

Luke made to stand.

"Luke," Han huffed. "C'mon, I got—I got a real bad feeling about this."

Luke's gaze met Leia's, his expression bordering on gleeful.

"What," Luke grinned. "You're not _scared_ , are you, Han?"

In the dark, Han's scowl seemed much more menacing than Leia knew it to be.

"Do I look scared?" he snapped.

Chewie barked a single syllable that all three of them easily understood.

"Well, I'm not," Han growled. He jabbed a finger towards the building looming ahead. "Something's off about this place—about this whole thing. We're being watched, kid. I can—"

"You can feel it," Leia murmured, and Han turned scathing eyes on her. Leia, however, hadn't been meaning to tease him for the irony in those words, that Han should utter the very phrase that so rankled him when Luke said it. No, Leia had finished his sentence because, as soon as he'd given voice to it, she realized that it was the heart of the uneasiness she'd been feeling the entire evening—that they weren't alone. Suddenly her hands felt clammy around her blaster.

"We _are_ being watched, I think," Luke said at length. He looked momentarily up at the temple, and then turned pensive, vibrant eyes on them once more. "It's the Force. It's strong here. I've never felt anything like it before."

Leia thought Han looked even less happy than he would have if Luke had told him they were about to be ambushed by stormtroopers.

The four of them remained huddled in the shadows, absorbing Luke's words and gazing in trepidation at the destroyed temple. Leia's uneasiness seemed to be growing stronger by the minute, every particle in her body thrumming, until finally she couldn't stand to remain there, crouched in the dead leaves, shivering in the wind and fretting over what might have been watching them in the midnight woods. She stowed the scanner in her pack and stood.

"We've made it this far," she reminded them, and then she stepped from beneath the trees.

The stone steps that lead to the entryway must once have made for an impressive sight. After the obvious attack on the temple, however, the stairs were broken and fragmented. Leia had to step over the ruins, her feet crunching and slipping in the muddy, dense cover of bracken that two decades of vacancy had brought upon the temple.

"Kriffing—Mumbo-Jumbo Manor over here," she heard Han mutter under his breath from close behind her. "Yeah, let's go on in—great idea, real inviting place—"

Even despite her own intense anxiety, Leia almost laughed.

At the top of the steps—now a good two stories above the ground where they'd crouched before—Leia paused and waited for Luke. He was the one who needed answers from this place, and so Leia felt that he should be the one to first step foot inside.

Her friend met her eyes for just a moment, and then she watched him draw a deep breath and stride with determination into the temple. For a moment Leia thought her eyes must have been playing tricks on her. It was so dark inside that Luke seemed to vanish the second he crossed the threshold: unnaturally dark, she thought—pitch black, like the moonlight behind them couldn't penetrate the darkness inside, and with a wild burst of fear, Leia hurried in after him.

Her booted feet touched what must have been polished marble, and Leia almost staggered, rendered breathless in the dense, cold air. She physically felt the age of the chamber in which she stood—felt it in the absolute stillness of the air, felt it in the way the back of her neck prickled—sensing, though she could not see, the size of the cavernous hall. Goosebumps rose on her skin from head to toe, and she wheeled back around, unnerved, and certain for one wild moment that the doorway behind her would have been gone.

The doorway was still there, however, the shadowy woods visible beyond it, and the tall, broad figures of Han and Chewbacca entering behind her were thrown into relief.

"Here," Han grunted, activating a glowrod and pressing it into her hand. In its faint light she could see that Luke had been directly beside her the whole time, waiting for the rest of his friends. He followed Han's lead, pulling a glowrod from his own pack and holding it aloft, the blue light illuminating a bit more of their surroundings.

Before them it seemed there was a long, wide hallway with many archways leading into separate rooms that were just barely visible in the dimness.

"How big is this place?" Han asked as they crept forward. There were leaves on the ground inside, too, as there had been outside. A statue of some kind that seemed to have once stood in the center of the space was on its side up ahead, fragmented into several large pieces.

"I suppose we're about to find out," Leia breathed, clutching her glowrod more tightly.

Luke veered towards the first archway.

"This way," he called.

The archway led into a much more narrow corridor that was somehow impossibly darker than the entranceway, and she could have sworn that their glowrods were only casting about half as much light as they should have been.

Behind her, she heard Chewie speak Han's name. The wookiee's voice echoed in the stone corridor—the temple was silent. Silent and dark, dark and silent. Leia's heart was pounding. She couldn't even hear the howling wind outside, anymore. She could hear nothing but for Chewbacca warbling to Han and the sounds of their footsteps—

"Ah!"

Her boot caught on something and Leia went sprawling, dropping her glowrod so that she could brace herself with both hands. She felt an immediate, hot sting in her palms that told her she would have raw, ugly scrapes.

On her hands and knees on the floor, Leia reached for her glowrod, barely hearing Han and Luke asking if she was alright when she saw, on the ground not a foot away from her face—

Leia screamed.

"What! What is it?!"

"Leia!"

Arms closed around her biceps as she scrambled to get on her feet; even when Han had hoisted her upright and tried to step away from her Leia reached around behind herself and clamped onto his wrists. She backed up as close to his body as she could get, panting, not daring to step anywhere else when she couldn't see the floor, knowing that at least wherever Han stood was safe.

"What happened?" Luke asked, but Leia couldn't speak yet—the adrenaline had been a shock to her system, and her body, for once in her life, seemed to have been inclined to flee in a choice between a fight or flight response. She was suddenly aware that Han had pulled his arms free from her startled grasp; she'd ended up half behind him, clutching his arm while he held his glowrod extended towards where she'd tripped.

Han's light was unnecessary, however, for Leia's glowrod was still where it had landed. There, thrown into terrible relief in the ghoulish blue light the tool cast, lay what was unmistakably a human skull, its hollow eye sockets staring up at them.

Leia took deep, shuddering breaths.

"Looks like we've got company, huh?" Han murmured, moving to squat before the skeleton. Reluctantly Leia released his arm.

Luke joined him in standing over the body, but Leia was not at all inclined to examine it more closely.

"A Jedi knight," Luke said quietly, running his glowrod over the skeleton's robes and illuminating a rusted, cracked shaft near the skeleton's hand that Leia realized, with a start, must have been the hilt of a lightsaber.

She caught her breath.

"When the Imperials raided this place, they must not have bothered to dispose of the bodies," she said hesitantly. "There's likely—"

"More," Han confirmed, standing and striding further down the corridor. His glowrod found yet another skeleton in a heap near the opposite wall.

"This ain't a temple," he said flatly, wheeling back around to face them. "It's a tomb."

Shivering again, Leia looked to Luke, who had retrieved her glowrod for her. His mouth was set in a grim line, and she didn't blame him for appearing deeply troubled by the implications of that fact. They'd all known that the Jedi had been eradicated by the Empire, but it must have been something else entirely for him to face their skeletal remains. With a pang of sympathy, she wondered whether he was thinking about his father.

"Come on," Luke muttered. "And everybody watch your step."

They continued through the temple, single file in the long corridors and spreading out to search the larger rooms, searching for anything resembling data banks, datapads, computers, holorecorders, books… Every room they searched, however, was stripped bare. It seemed the Imperials hadn't bothered to remove the bodies of the Jedi they'd slain, but they certainly seemed to have made an effort to clear out anything else that might have been of value. And what was worse, the temple was mazelike—a veritable labyrinth. Multiple times they would turn into a room, only to find they had already been there. Or else they'd leave, expecting to return to the hallway through which they'd entered, and instead finding a dead end. In the blackness with only their dim glowrods, in all the twisting, turning corridors and the interconnected rooms, it was near impossible not to get lost. Leia was sweating in her jacket. Her heart rate had never really gone back to normal after having discovered the first skeleton, and her nerves were stretched thin. In her ears Han's and Luke's voices echoed: _we're being watched, this is a tomb._ Multiple times Leia thought she felt a brush on her arm, only to whip around and find no one was there. Every time they discovered the body of another fallen Jedi, her hair seemed to stand, impossibly, further on end, and she was on edge every time they turned a corner.

Finally, after what seemed an hour, they came to a staircase. One flight descended downwards towards lower levels, and the other twisted upwards and out of sight.

The four of them eyed the stairs warily.

"We should stick together."

"Let's split up."

Han and Luke turned to each other in exasperation, having both spoken at the same time. Leia pinched the bridge of her nose and looked up at Chewie.

"We're not splitting up," Han argued, crossing his arm over his chest.

"It's just an empty building," Luke pointed out. "The sooner we finish searching the place, the sooner we can leave."

"'S not an empty building," Han huffed, gesturing behind them towards the most recently discovered skeleton.

Luke shook his head.

"They're just bones," he said regretfully.

"I know they're bones! I don't want my bones to join 'em!"

"Luke's right," Leia finally cut in. "We'll cover more ground if we split up. Luke and I upstairs, you two downstairs. Alright?"

Han looked more than ready to argue, and Leia suspected if he hadn't already been so angry with her, he would have. Instead he offered her only a bitter twist of his mouth, and then he and Chewbacca started down the staircase.

"Alright," Leia whispered as she and Luke rushed up the narrow flight of stairs. "Let's make this quick."

The second level offered no more luck than the first. It seemed to be smaller—clearly several of the chambers of the ground level had such high ceilings that they took up both levels—and fortunately there were less skeletons. In one room Luke and Leia found an array of computers that had clearly been an archive room of sorts, but every single system seemed to have been shot through with blaster bolts multiple times.

"Maybe we can salvage something," Leia winced, kneeling before a monitor with Luke. The computers were covered in several layers of thick dust; she coughed as she attempted to clear some of it with her fingers, squinting in the light of her glowrod to find a power key.

"There's no power," Luke shook his head. He strode toward one corner at the far end of the long room. Leia didn't know how he could see so far in the dark, but she could hear him rummaging through what she supposed must have been cabinets. She turned, intent on joining him.

A flash of white moved in her peripheral vision.

Leia froze, her eyes moving at once to the doorway. There was nothing there—or, was there? It was so dark that she couldn't have been sure. Her pulse sped up, her senses amplified.

"I think I've got something," Luke called. Leia seemed to hear him from the other end of a long tunnel; his voice was barely audible over the sudden rushing in her ears, and at the moment a crack of thunder sounded outside. "Looks like a filing cabinet—"

Still focused with nervous intensity on the empty doorway, Leia slowly, cautiously stood. She'd only seen it out of the corner of her eye, after all. It had probably been nothing, just her anxious mind playing tricks on her.

Still, Leia couldn't move—couldn't look away from the doorway. She couldn't even hear Luke anymore, her attention entirely fixed on the deep blackness through the door. Probably nothing, but what if it wasn't? She couldn't seem to dismiss it, and she was halfway back across the room before she realized that she'd been creeping forward, drawn towards the door almost against her will.

Heart in her throat, Leia held her glowrod out in front of her, not even daring to breathe as she reached the doorway at last—her boots making not a sound on the ancient stone beneath her feet. She hesitated just out of line of sight of the hall, fearful of what she might find, until with a burst of fear she stepped forward into the corridor, turning towards the way she and Luke had come.

Nothing there, she determined, though it was more that she was reassuring herself than reaching any conclusion, as it was so dark that she as certain there could have been someone before her, standing just out of the light of her glowrod.

Then the back of her neck prickled again, the feeling that she was being watched amplified a hundred fold, as though there were a gaze upon her that was physical, tangible, touching her skin.

Slowly, Leia turned around.

There, about twenty steps away from her in the black hall—so black she couldn't see the walls, couldn't see the end—there stood a figure. It was small, slight, with pale skin that seemed to somehow glow in the darkness, and Leia stared at her in shock, unable to move.

It was—but it couldn't have been.

It was her—Leia—staring back at her, only it was Leia as she had been years before. A child, a little girl. Somehow even in the absolute dark, Leia could see the coil of braids around the younger Leia's head.

She was so stunned that she couldn't scream, couldn't speak. She'd forgotten all about Luke, somewhere in the other room. She was transfixed, disbelieving. Cold currents seemed to be dancing over her skin, like electricity, like breath, and the only thought she seemed capable of processing was, _how?_

The little girl— _me,_ Leia thought, _but surely not_ —did not move or speak. She stood as still as stone, as still as Leia was standing, staring, and in the darkness her eyes seemed bottomless and far too old for such a young face.

It seemed an eternity passed that Leia stood frozen in horrified, startled confusion, and then the child turned and disappeared into the darkness.

This time Leia didn't hesitate; she hurried forward automatically, rushing after the retreating figure. The girl didn't seem to be running, and yet even as Leia broke into a dead sprint she couldn't quite seem to catch up. A flash of lightning through a tall window at the very end of the hallway suddenly illuminated the entire corridor, catching the child turning a corner, a cacophony of thunder rending the air as Leia sped after her. _A trick,_ she thought, _this is a trick_ —and yet she couldn't help but feel that it was truly herself she was chasing, unthinking, unquestioning, following the younger Leia with increasing desperation until, after another frantic turn into a dark room, Leia skidded to an abrupt halt.

In the middle of the chamber, the little girl was huddled on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees and her head bowed and in shadow. She was weeping.

"Hello?" Leia asked, her fear returning in an instant. Suddenly she realized that she no longer held her glowrod, and yet she could see the child with otherworldly clarity. Leia braced against a near-hysterical terror. She stepped further into the room. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"MAMA," the child-Leia screamed, her shoulders shaking with visible agony. "PAPA!" she cried. Her sobs were so loud they seemed to shake the walls around them—they were louder even than the thunder that continued to sound in the distance—they seemed to be in Leia's own bones. "PLEASE! MAMA! PLEASE!"

On and on the child cried, calling for her mother and father, and a sick feeling blossomed in Leia's stomach that soon spread up to her chest and into her limbs. The girl could scream and scream, but Breha Organa wouldn't come. Bail Organa would not—could not—come, and the sound of the young Leia's plaintive wails was unbearable—distressing, unreal, infuriating. Leia needed it to stop, couldn't stand to listen, to feel the despair that the child felt, and before she even realized what she was doing, she was speaking to the apparition once more.

"Stop it," Leia whispered, her voice wavering and uncertain. She stepped towards the child on shaking feet, saying it over and over, begging the child to stop crying, but the younger Leia continued to scream and gasp for breath, begging for parents that they both seemed to know were lost, lost.

"Stop it!" Leia shouted, near to tears herself. "STOP!" She fell to her knees, her arms outstretched, ready to-what? To shake the girl, to console her? She didn't know and didn't find out. The girl lifted her head at last, and then Leia did scream—shrieking, at last, in terror. The child was gone, and she was replaced with—with Leia. Not past Leia, not child Leia, but Leia as she was, her own face looking back at her, eyes crazed and agonized from grief, cheeks stained with tears, and the real Leia—was she real? Was anything real?—recoiled, her shout a raw trill in her throat.

But then her doppelganger wasn't looking at her anymore, but past her, beyond her, and she seemed to shrink. Leia followed her gaze, shaken, over her shoulder, and her own sob died on her lips. The thunder was gone, the howling wind vanished again, giving way to a new sound, one that she knew all too well, the rhythm of it one that she heard often in her haunted, persistent nightmares.

"We meet again, Your Highness."

Leia scrabbled backwards, still on the floor. She wanted grab for her blaster, to shoot him, to flee, but nothing in her body seemed to be working as the looming figure of Darth Vader filled the doorway. Then she saw it wasn't the doorway anymore. The dark room—the Jedi temple—was gone; the stone beneath her turned to freezing metal, and yet the darkness still remained as she cowered in her cell. How she could see Vader, she had no idea—how could anything exist in this black vacuum, this awful darkness? Had it happened yet? Was Alderaan dead? Vader was unmoving—a phantom, a ghost—his mechanical breathing like knives in her ears.

"Please," Leia suddenly found herself begging. "Please! Not Alderaan! Not Alderaan! Please! I'll do anything! Take me—kill me instead! Kill me, please!"

Vader stared at her, his breathing louder and louder, and Leia screamed over it, still begging for her planet to be spared.

At last Vader moved, lifting one massive, sinister, black-gloved hand to point, and her cell flipped end-over-end and vanished as she looked to where he gestured. There, on the ground, lay Han. His body was contorted, a look of agony upon his face, eyes unseeing, limbs unmoving—he was dead, he was a statue—a stone corpse, a dead imposter Han, lifeless and murdered and surrounded by mist.

"NO!" Leia screamed. "NO! HAN! NO!"

On her hands and knees she threw herself across the floor. How had he died? When had he come in? Vader had killed him, _dead dead dead_. In agony Leia grasped for his arms, but they crumbled and disintegrated in her grasp—fractured like the temple's ruined steps—and all that was left of him was a pile of bones to join the skeletons all around her—there were suddenly hundreds and thousands of skeletons all around her.

"HAN!" Leia wept, choking and gasping—screaming herself hoarse. "HAN!"

Somewhere in the room Darth Vader was still breathing. Over the sound of her own screams she could hear him, a monster unseen in all the mist.

"WHERE ARE YOU?" Leia screeched, jolting to her feet. Hot fury burned in her chest. She wanted to kill him, wanted to hurt him, to make him suffer. She didn't even know what she wanted—she couldn't think, she wasn't a person. Before her eyes she saw Alderaan exploding, Han, a pile of rock and bones and dust at her feet. She wanted to die, she wanted to kill, she couldn't bear it—how could she make it end?

Vader's breathing seemed to be right behind her, then, and Leia turned, terrified, but it was not Vader that she saw. It was herself again, it was Leia, clad all in white, but she was unseeing and still, and then she fell to her knees and collapsed—lifeless—on the ground. Leia gaped in horror at her own dead self there on the floor, and at the thing behind her: a darkness, a silhouette—a person made of blackness that stood where the other Leia had just been standing. It walked towards her then, advancing, and the real Leia collapsed just as she had watched herself collapse moments before.

"Stop!" she cried. "Stop! Stop! Make it stop! Please, please, help me!"

She curled into a ball, weeping, hugging her knees, tucking her face in, certain that she was about to die.

 _Leia,_ a voice whispered. _Leia, Leia._

Whispering, whispering in her ear. Not Vader, not herself, and the blind terror that had seized her limbs seemed at last to abate.

 _Leia._

"Mama?" Leia whimpered, lifting her head, certain that she felt the lightest of touches on her arm—

"Leia! LEIA!"

Leia opened her eyes.

"Leia," Han gasped, skidding to his knees in front of her. For one wild instant, Leia thought he wasn't real, and she flinched away from him. Then however, she finally seemed to come back to reality.

Han was before her, his hands prying her arms away from her torso, as though searching for wounds. She was still in the Jedi temple, she realized, but she had no recollection of ending up where she was. Around her were four crumbling walls, but above her were only clouds—she'd somehow wound up in the part of the temple where the roof had been blasted away, huddled against the wall, and what was more, she was soaking wet. It was pouring, the rain cold as ice. She could see that, within moment's, Han's hair was plastered to his head.

"What happened?!" Han was demanding, still running his hands all over her. "You alright? Leia! Are you alright?!"

Leia almost burst into tears. Suddenly she wanted to run her hands all over his body, the sight of him dead in that stone sarcophagus still vivid in her mind. She settled for clutching at his arms, feeling his heat, his solidity—his living, breathing reality.

"Yes," she gasped, shaking violently—shivering both from the icy rain and wind and from the nightmare she'd just endured. "Yes, I'm alright—I don't know—I was—"

Han only shook his head, his face white as a sheet—paler than death, she thought with a terrified jolt—as though he had been the one who'd seen a ghost. Leia had never seen him looked so frightened, and it reinforced her own trembling fear.

"C'mon," he blurted. He practically grabbed her under her armpits and lifted her onto her feet. Another flash of lightning—another—Leia jumped about a foot in the air when she saw the figures standing behind Han, but it was only Chewie and Luke. Chewie stood facing the door, crossbow drawn, but Luke was looking at her, and in his eyes…

"C'mon," Han said again, grabbing her by the wrist and hauling her behind him to the doorway. "We're getting outta here."

Leia didn't need to be told twice.

—XXX—

She was certain she'd never been happier to be aboard the Millennium Falcon, which was a considerable feat, as the ship had rescued her from near-death more times than she could count.

Bundled up in her thermal leggings and the thickest shirt Han could procure, she sat huddled around the holochess table, wedged between him and Luke while Chewie passed around steaming mugs of kaffe. They were safely in hyperspace, and all of them were wrapped up in the warmest blankets the ship had to offer, though Han had draped part of his over her shoulders, as well, in addition to the one she was already clutching about herself as tightly as possible. Droplets of water were running down the back of her neck, dripping from her soaked, bedraggled braids. They'd run back to the ship faster than Leia would have thought possible, fleeing the temple like they would flee an entire battalion of stormtroopers. Han hadn't let go of her wrist the entire time.

Still shivering almost uncontrollably, Leia listened silently as Han and Chewie explained in more detail how they'd been hunting around down in the tunnels beneath the temple when they head Leia screaming like she was being murdered. They had, Han said, sprinted up to the second level and found Luke standing in some kind of trance, unmoving and unblinking in the middle of an empty room, staring at something they couldn't see.

Into his mug Luke would only say that he hadn't heard Leia screaming—hadn't heard anything, not even the storm.

Leia shivered again despite the hot kaffe and the warm blankets.

"What were you doing in there, kid?" Han demanded, clearly still incredibly on edge.

Leia lifted her eyes to Luke's face, his blond hair still damp. His expression seemed to reflect exactly what she herself felt.

Luke fiddled with the edges of his blanket.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I thought I saw… I don't know," he shook his head.

Leia pressed deeper into her blanket, unable to rid herself of the bone-deep cold. Luke's reticence only unsettled her even further—had he seen something, too? And if he had, did that mean that what she'd experienced had been real, and not merely some hallucination? Leia held her kaffe mug against her chest, feeling the heat of the drink seep through her clothes and into her skin. Was she losing her mind? Or had it been something… else?

"I must have been… I guess it was a panic attack," she whispered uncertainly when everyone turned expectant eyes on her. No one seemed to believe her, and she couldn't blame them. She didn't believe it herself. She shuddered again, and this time Han wrapped his arm around her.

For a long while they all sat around the table, sipping their kaffe. No one seemed willing to turn in and go to bed. They all had a second mug.

"It was all a waste," Luke said bitterly after a while. He looked around at them all, wearing an expression of contrition and deep disappointment. "You were right, Han. We should never have gone in there. I don't know what I expected to find, but… It was my fault."

"It wasn't your fault, Luke," Leia murmured, seeing his growing dismay.

Against her, Han heaved a deep sigh. His arm was still draped over her. It was closer than they'd been in weeks and weeks, and rather than feel uncomfortable by his obvious affection in front of Luke and Chewie, Leia couldn't seem to get enough of it—of his touch, his warmth, his caring. She pressed closer still, under the guise of drawing their shared blanked around herself more tightly.

"Don't worry about it, Luke," he said gruffly. "You had to—ah, you had to try."

They all grimly nodded their agreement, though Luke seemed only minimally mollified. From across the table, Chewie warbled: _And we will try again._

Leia lifted her mug once more to her lips, the caffeine and heat and familiarity of it seeming to soothe and reinvigorate her. She took another sip, and another as Han shifted next to her beneath the blanket.

"Wonder where that woman came from, though," he frowned. "Or where she went."

Leia's heart stopped.

"What woman?" she asked sharply, turning to more fully face Han.

It was his turn to look startled and uncertain.

"The woman," he repeated. "Didn't you see her?"

"There was no woman, Han," Luke spoke slowly, a frown on his exhausted face. "It was just us."

"No," Han said adamantly. "There was some lady in there! She was—" he swallowed. "She led us to Leia."

Leia dropped her mug.

—XXX—

For the rest of the evening, Leia barely spoke a word, hardly daring to believe what she'd heard and certainly not willing to think what it might have meant.

It wasn't until what must have been around 0600 in the morning that they all finally rose, so tired they could barely keep their eyes open and yet wired, still, from the kaffe and from the events of the preceding hours. Luke was the first to stand, appearing so calm that Leia stared after him as he bid them a quiet goodnight and made for the crew quarters.

Chewie stood next, and then Leia extracted herself from beneath Han's arm and processed behind the others towards her waiting bunk without another word. She reached the crew quarters, where Luke was swinging his legs up into his usual bunk, the creak from nearby that was Chewie climbing into his hammock audible in the rather quiet ship. They still had about five hours left before they would come out of hyperspace, and yet Leia couldn't bring herself to get into bed and rest. She hovered in the threshold, her eyes burning and her hands still somehow shaking a little bit.

"Leia?" Luke asked, propped up on one elbow. "You alright?"

She bit her lip, trying not to remember any of what had happened at the temple.

"Yes," she whispered, entering the small cabin at last to climb into her bunk. She spent only a few moments beneath the covers, however, before she impulsively found herself casting them aside and slipping from the room.

Han was sitting on his bunk when she crept hesitantly into his cabin, and he seemed not the slightest bit surprised to see her standing there. His pupils looked shades darker than she'd ever seen them, but not cold—not like the eyes of whatever specter she'd seen earlier in the night. His gaze was warm, heavy, like the blanket he'd draped over her shoulder at the holochess table, and neither of them said a word as she stepped forward and slid into his bunk.

Han tugged his worn comforter up over the both of them, and seemingly of their own volition her fists clutched at his shirt, her feet found his shins, and Han drew her close. Leia felt suddenly like crying again, as though she was just then processing what had happened—the hellish temple, the horrible vision, or panic attack, or whatever it had been, and all the terrible, unsettling things she'd been so sure she'd seen. All at once she thought of Han's dead body, of his bitter face before, when he'd found out she'd lied about the supply run—she thought about the year before, when he'd made her hot chocolate, with his wild, rumpled hair—thought of the look on his face, soaked in the rain, screaming her name over the thunder, and wrapping her up in his blanket…

Her lip trembled.

"Han," she began, the first word either of them had spoken since she'd entered his cabin. Her voice audibly wavered, and she swallowed against the lump in her throat. "Han, I'm—"

But Han shook his head, gaze boring into hers. Their faces were mere centims apart. He seemed to understand exactly what she'd meant to say. He drew her close, against his chest, and pressed his lips to her drying hair. They'd never lain together in such a way before, with such obvious intentions-not sexual, not even romantic-but intimate, and close, and so very much _more_. Leia pressed her face against Han's skin, feeling his heart, breathing him in.

In her last moments before finally, finally drifting to sleep, warm and safe for the first time in what felt like days, Leia wondered if there was even the smallest possibility that her mother had led Han to find her in the darkness.


End file.
